When, in 2005, the University of Chicago entered into a US$81 million renovation of a major library building, one of the primary goals was to ensure that the university’s collection of printed books in the social sciences and humanities would remain under one roof.
That goal was achieved six years later. However, it also meant that a good part of the library’s print collection, while technically being “under the library roof,” was moved “under the ground.” The renovation included a subterranean automated system that can store and retrieve up to 3.5 million books.
Chicago’s library project could well represent the end of an era – the era of colleges and universities expending millions of dollars so that printed books can be housed in on-campus libraries.In my 25-year career as an academic librarian, I have witnessed the explosion of digital technology into academic life and played a part in the ongoing struggle to balance digital information with the familiar solidity of print in academic library collections.
While I believe there will always be a place for the book in the hearts of academics, it is far less likely there will be a place for the book, or at least for every book, on the academic campus.
Changing goals of costly shelf space
Keeping a printed book in a library is not cheap.
The most recent analysis pegs the total cost of keeping one book in an open library stack (the kind that allows browsing) at $4.26 per year (in 2009 dollars). High-density shelving, a less costly alternative to open stacks, comes at $.86 per book, per year (again, in 2009 dollars).
And given the costs, academic financial officers blanch at proposals to build new on-campus storage capacity for thousands, in some cases millions, of books.
This is not to say that academic library construction and renovation have come to an end. But rather than being conceived of as on-campus book warehouses, academic libraries are today being reimagined as spaces in which learning, collaboration and intellectual engagement take center stage.
Look at the following examples:
At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), the web page providing information on the construction of a new library building for the Monroe Park campus proclaims:
90% of the new space will be for student use, not for storing books or materials.
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) is in the midst of an addition and renovation project that will add 60,000 square feet of new library space and renovate 92,000 square feet of existing library space.
The stated goals of the UCSB project include such desiderata as “expanded wireless access,” “additional and enhanced group study and collaboration spaces,” and a “faculty collaboration studio.” Additional book capacity is not part of the plan.
Even more extreme, the University of Michigan’s $55 million renovation of its Taubman Health Sciences Library (completed in 2015) has removed all print books from the library in order to accommodate classrooms and “collaboration rooms.”
An entire floor is now devoted to “clinical simulation rooms” where medical students hone their diagnostic and clinical skills through simulated hands-on practice.
All these are part of a mainstream trend in which the printed book, though still part of the academic library ensemble, is being relegated to the role of supporting player rather than the lead actor.
New ways of storage
In the face of these changes, academic librarians have no choice but to take action. Their challenge, though, is that there are simply too many print books and not enough on-campus space to store them.
The most obvious solution to too many books is “weeding,” the library profession’s term for removing books from a collection. While weeding creates space for new books, it has significant labor and disposal costs. Also, it can meet with stiff resistance from faculty and students.
So an increasingly popular strategy for managing overcrowded stacks is moving books to high-density, low-cost, off-campus storage.
This too can be met with resistance from faculty and students. For example, at Syracuse University, faculty reacted with with what was described as “fury” when campus librarians planned to move low-use books to an off-campus storage facility.
Even so, the practice has become routine for many academic libraries. As of 2014, an estimated 75 high-density academic library storage facilities have been built in the US.
Often located where land is cheaper and more plentiful than on crowded college campuses, climate-controlled high-density storage facilities house books and other library materials in space-saving compact shelving. While the items in such facilities are not browseable, their bibliographic records remain in the library catalog and the items themselves can be recalled if needed by a library user.
This number includes facilities that serve a single library. But it also includes several shared mega-facilities, such as:
The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) – a partnership of Columbia University, The New York Public Library, and Princeton University – houses more than 12 million volumes.
The Minnesota Library Access Center – serving the University of Minnesota along with a consortium of smaller libraries around the state – has a capacity of 1.5 million volumes.
The University of Texas and Texas A&M shared repository, which opened in 2013, has a capacity for over one million volumes and is designed to be expandable to a two-million-volume facility.
The statewide Ohiolink system includes five regional repositories whose shared capacity approaches 10 million volumes.
The combined University of California Northern and Southern Regional Library Facilities have the capacity to house a combined 13 million volumes.
But because of the high costs involved, books are also being weeded out as they are moved.
Rather than keeping five copies of Book X, each deposited by a separate library, a shared storage facility may keep only a single “best copy” to be shared by all the contributing libraries.
Things have gone so far that Texas’ high-density repository is home to books that are the shared property of both the University of Texas and Texas A&M, a rather astounding state of affairs for anyone familiar with the length and depth of the rivalry between the two institutions.
Future of campus libraries
Besides building shared repositories, academic libraries are also developing distributed storage projects as a way of reducing the pressure on library stack space.
Rather than relying on large repositories, distributed storage schemes are based on multilibrary agreements. A member library agrees to hold an archival print copy of a bound journal or monograph so that other members of the consortia can dispose of their copies.
Academic librarians have formed a task force to investigate the creation of a distributed shared monograph archive on behalf of HathiTrust, a shared digital preservation repository containing the scans of millions of printed books belonging to a coalition of academic libraries.
The proposed HathiTrust monograph archive will allow those same academic libraries to reduce the footprint of their on-campus collections by relying on shared archival copies of low-use, mostly public domain books whose full texts are available digitally via HathiTrust.
While there is certain to be resistance to any future plans to move books out of campus book stacks, the inescapable calculus of more print books and less on-campus space to house them will, in the end, overwhelm resistance.
Academic library consultant Lizanne Payne accurately sums up the current situation:
On most campuses, library shelf space is finite and even shrinking. Gone are the days when a proactive library director could argue successfully for a library expansion to house more books.
Traditionalists may not like it, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, in the long term, campuses will not require ever more space to house printed books.
Donald Barclay
Donald Barclay is the deputy university librarian at the University of California, Merced. He started at UC Merced in 2002, and prior to that I held librarian positions at the Texas Medical Center-Houston Academy of Medicine, University of Houston, and New Mexico State University. In a previous existence, Barclay was a firefighter on a U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew. Hisresearch and publishing interests include libraries and information, the literature of the American West, and children's literature.
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Business and Management INK
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The Use of Bad Data Reveals a Need for Retraction in Governmental Data Bases
Course
Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions
Ethics
The Importance of Using Proper Research Citations to Encourage Trustworthy News Reporting
Research Integrity Should Not Mean Its Weaponization
What Do We Know about Plagiarism These Days?
Event
Webinar: iGen: Decoding the Learning Code of Generation Z
Year of Open Science Conference
Webinar: How to Collaborate Across Paradigms – Embedding Culture in Mixed Methods Designs
Featured
Returning Absentee Ballots during the 2020 Election – A Surprise Ending?
Overconsumption or a Move Towards Minimalism?
To Better Serve Students and Future Workforces, We Must Diversify the Syllabi
Higher Education Reform
Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact
Addressing the United Kingdom’s Lack of Black Scholars
Research Integrity Should Not Mean Its Weaponization
Impact
Survey Suggests University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Climate Change Action
Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa
Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact
Industry
Why Social Science? Because It Makes an Outsized Impact on Policy
The Importance of Using Proper Research Citations to Encourage Trustworthy News Reporting
A Behavioral Scientist’s Take on the Dangers of Self-Censorship in Science
Infrastructure
2024 Holberg Prize Goes to Political Theorist Achille Mbembe
Edward Webster, 1942-2024: South Africa’s Pioneering Industrial Sociologist
New Funding Opportunity for Criminal and Juvenile Justice Doctoral Researchers
Innovation
To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing
Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions
Why Social Science? Because It Makes an Outsized Impact on Policy
Insights
There’s Something in the Air, Part 2 – But It’s Not a Miasma
The Fog of War
A Community Call: Spotlight on Women’s Safety in the Music Industry
Interdisciplinarity
Philip Rubin: FABBS’ Accidental Essential Man Linking Research and Policy
How Intelligent is Artificial Intelligence?
National Academies’s Committee On Law And Justice Seeks Experts
International Debate
Why Don’t Algorithms Agree With Each Other?
A Black History Addendum to the American Music Industry
When University Decolonization in Canada Mends Relationships with Indigenous Nations and Lands
Interview
A Behavioral Scientist’s Take on the Dangers of Self-Censorship in Science
Jonathan Breckon On Knowledge Brokerage and Influencing Policy
Research for Social Good Means Addressing Scientific Misconduct
Investment
NSF Looks Headed for a Half-Billion Dollar Haircut
NSF Responsible Tech Initiative Looking at AI, Biotech and Climate
New Report Finds Social Science Key Ingredient in Innovation Recipe
Jobs
Digital Transformation Needs Organizational Talent and Leadership Skills to Be Successful
Six Principles for Scientists Seeking Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure
Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries
News
Survey Suggests University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Climate Change Action
Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: The Grandfather of Behavioral Economics
2024 Holberg Prize Goes to Political Theorist Achille Mbembe
Open Access
Canadian Librarians Suggest Secondary Publishing Rights to Improve Public Access to Research
Webinar: How Can Public Access Advance Equity and Learning?
Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada: A Conversation
Opinion
A Former Student Reflects on How Daniel Kahneman Changed Our Understanding of Human Nature
Four Reasons to Stop Using the Word ‘Populism’
A Black History Addendum to the American Music Industry
PIBBS
The Added Value of Latinx and Black Teachers
A Collection: Behavioral Science Insights on Addressing COVID’s Collateral Effects
Susan Fiske Connects Policy and Research in Print
Posters
Presentations
Working Alongside Artificial Intelligence Key Focus at Critical Thinking Bootcamp 2022
Watch the Forum: A Turning Point for International Climate Policy
Event: Living, Working, Dying: Demographic Insights into COVID-19
Public Engagement
Connecting Legislators and Researchers, Leads to Policies Based on Scientific Evidence
Philip Rubin: FABBS’ Accidental Essential Man Linking Research and Policy
Involving patients – or abandoning them?
Public Policy
There’s Something in the Air, Part 2 – But It’s Not a Miasma
To Better Forecast AI, We Need to Learn Where Its Money Is Pointing
A Community Call: Spotlight on Women’s Safety in the Music Industry
Recent Appointments
Economist Kaye Husbands Fealing to Lead NSF’s Social Science Directorate
Jane M. Simoni Named New Head of OBSSR
Canada’s Federation For Humanities and Social Sciences Welcomes New Board Members
Recognition
2024 Holberg Prize Goes to Political Theorist Achille Mbembe
AAPSS Names Eight as 2024 Fellows
Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences Names Spring 2024 Fellows
Reports
National Academies Looks at How to Reduce Racial Inequality In Criminal Justice System
Survey Examines Global Status Of Political Science Profession
Report: Latest Academic Freedom Index Sees Global Declines
Research
The Risks Of Using Research-Based Evidence In Policymaking
Surveys Provide Insight Into Three Factors That Encourage Open Data and Science
Unskilled But Aware: Rethinking The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Research
Three Decades of Rural Health Research and a Bumper Crop of Insights from South Africa
Using Translational Research as a Model for Long-Term Impact
Coping with Institutional Complexity and Voids: An Organization Design Perspective for Transnational Interorganizational Projects
Research Ethics
Maintaining Anonymity In Double-Blind Peer Review During The Age of Artificial Intelligence
Hype Terms In Research: Words Exaggerating Results Undermine Findings
Five Steps to Protect – and to Hear – Research Participants
Resources
Free Online Course Reveals The Art of ChatGPT Interactions
New Tool Promotes Responsible Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure in Research Institutions
Apply for Sage’s 2024 Concept Grants
Science & Social Science
NSF Responsible Tech Initiative Looking at AI, Biotech and Climate
There’s Something In the Air…But Is It a Virus? Part 1
New Report Finds Social Science Key Ingredient in Innovation Recipe
Social Science Bites
Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias
Alison Gopnik on Care
Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict
Teaching
Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict
Gamification as an Effective Instructional Strategy
Harnessing the Tide, Not Stemming It: AI, HE and Academic Publishing
The Data Bulletin
Immigration Court’s Active Backlog Surpasses One Million
Tips
Webinar Discusses Promoting Your Article
Webinar Examines Open Access and Author Rights
Ping, Read, Reply, Repeat: Research-Based Tips About Breaking Bad Email Habits
Tools
New Tool Promotes Responsible Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure in Research Institutions
New Dataset Collects Instances of ‘Contentious Politics’ Around the World
Matchmaking Research to Policy: Introducing Britain’s Areas of Research Interest Database
Videos
Watch The Lecture: The ‘E’ In Science Stands For Equity
Watch a Social Scientist Reflect on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Dispatches from Social and Behavioral Scientists on COVID
Webinar
Contemporary Politics Focus of March Webinar Series
New Thought Leadership Webinar Series Opens with Regional Looks at Research Impact
Webinar: How Can Public Access Advance Equity and Learning?